


To Dust

by biggrstaffbunch



Series: Into the Howling [3]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 19:42:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biggrstaffbunch/pseuds/biggrstaffbunch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Not all things must come to an end. Not every thing must come to dust.</i> </p><p>Rose persists, and the world falls down.  [post-Doomsday AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Dust

|

Rose finds that death has made more of an adventurer out of her than life ever did.

While the Doctor is off saving lives and thwarting foes, there remains a whole system of pathways and trajectories just waiting to be explored. Rose can't ignore the hollow call issuing from the pulsing green heart nestled in the shadows of the empty console room, and so she stays behind. 

Trails her fingers across the TARDIS walls, and walks.

Rose fancies herself a blade cutting into rock, the shearing away of layer after layer to unearth the depths of the ship she calls home. There are roots to uncover here, she knows. History. Because really, the entire place is a living grave, a breathing museum, songs drifting under doorjambs, laughter catching in keyholes. She comes across rooms long since abandoned, libraries and waterfalls and wardrobes, bedrooms where coats still hang, socks still lie on the floor. They are like shrines, like photographs, like corpses, perfectly preserved and collecting only the dust of age. 

It's almost perverse, the way Rose can track every lost soul that has ever come aboard this ship, just by the things they left behind. 

Well. She always knew the Doctor was a pack-rat. And this is the proof, the way Rose walks the line of rooms and picks through the past, item by item, space by space. A guitar collecting cobwebs for Fritz, a discarded chemistry set for Ace. A kilt in family colors for Jamie McCrimmon, who lent the Doctor his name long after the boy himself was lost. Rose touches the crackling plaster of Peri's wall, lets her mind plunge further into the depths of the TARDIS, sifting through historical debris, demanding intimate knowledge of those who came before. Susan and Adric and Tegan and Nyssa, Sarah Jane and Dr. Halloway and Leela and Romana. Jack. Martha. People who traveled with the Doctor, people he loved. The broken hearts he fixed and the strong hearts he broke. 

(All the others in time who wanted to stay with him forever.) 

Deep in the depths of her, Rose wonders if she is a form of retribution, if the collected vestiges of all these old spirits have come together in her spectral form, telling the Doctor that they will not be maintained like a garden grown wild. That they still exist, somewhere in some world during some year, and they deserve to be remembered by more than silent tombs, silent rooms. 

Rose's own room is next. She steps through the door and scans the darkness, an absent grief fluttering through her briefly. Pictures sit atop shelves, frozen smiles beaming through the darkness. She traces a hand across the mirror on her vanity, catches sight of the pale, barely-there outline of her face. Nothing but a smear of ivory across the wavering surface of the glass. She looks impermanent. Eraseable. She smiles grimly at the irony and walks to the bed.

The sheets are worn, but Rose doesn't mind. 

There isn't a duvet in all of time that could warm her enough to erase this cold inside her.

|

_"Oi, spaceman! Did you know, your ship's got ghosts? Spider queens and fat that walks away, and now you've got ghosts!"_

_The woman cocks her head, all inquisitive, indignant wonder. Her shoulder pads are up to her ears as she folds her arms, her eyes narrowed and suspicious. Already, her bags litter the TARDIS and her presence fills each room; she is undeniably a big ginger bundle of bluster, fury, and heart._

_The first time a human being has been in his home since Martha, and it is Donna Noble, super-temp of Chiswick. The Doctor rubs a finger across the bridge of his nose, sighs._

_"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, that'll be Rose."_

_Donna's eyes widen. "Rose," she says, her voice dropping in volume. Then, dangerously, "Rose. The lady love you lost, Rose? Rose, the one whose top you sniffed, Rose? Rose, where you were a gangly, weepy mess, Rose?" Her eyebrow arches. "That Rose?"_

_An indistinct muttering behind them, like rustling in the wind. Rose is laughing._

_"Yeah," the Doctor says again. "That Rose."_

_Donna huffs, though there's an uncharacteristic gentleness to the roll of her eyes. "Thought she was lost," Donna says. "Thought she was in a parallel world, gone forever, but safe."_

_The Doctor closes his eyes, and the TARDIS jerks into motion._

_"So did I," he whispers._

_As the vortex swallows them down, he spins the story of a shopgirl's death._

|

To hear the Doctor tell it, she's had quite the life.

Rose lingers in the corners and the curves of the TARDIS, the shadowy places that have been forgotten through the years, and she thinks of the poetry in the eulogy that is even now spilling from her Doctor's lips. 

An epic tale of stars and sacrifice, of Bad Wolves and werewolves and holding hands even as a black hole threatened to suck them into oblivion. There is love redolent in the weight of his words, a tangible, sweet sense of something deep and abiding and eternal. But underneath it all--and just as eternal--is the tangled mass of guilt. It sticks in the Doctor's syllables, makes his voice flat, and the disjunction of those feelings together, his unwillingness to let her go and his horror at having her here, is almost worth the price of admission.

Which was, after all, death.

Rose wonders if she should be disturbed by the satisfaction that rushes through her like an unchecked storm. The girl she was before would cry on her knees to see the man the Doctor has become. Defying the laws of the universe in deference to his love for her. Keeping the dead alive, in a fashion. He is undoing every code that he has ever kept, all to honor and maintain the memory of her hand in his.

Sobs ought to be ripping from her filmy, insubstantial throat. But after the void, after the ghost machine, after everything since the moment the Doctor lost her to the vast emptiness between worlds, Rose has no more tears. Only the dark, driving desire to stay. To show this lord of time that she is not a story to be told, a lost soul to grieve. 

She is here, and now. She cannot be unmade, cannot be ignored. 

Rose is indelible, there in the circles under the Doctor's eyes, the tremors of his limbs, the way he avoids catching his reflection in the mirror. She is not just another shade darting through the trees of his nightmares. She is the nightmare itself. 

(Not all things must come to an end. Not every thing must come to dust.)

The Doctor closes his eyes as he tells the tale of how she fell. Behind him, her breath stirring the wildness of his hair, her arms around him invisible, Rose sighs.

And smiles.

|

_"She's bloody frightening, if you don't mind me commenting," Donna says in an undertone, the first time Rose lets herself be seen._

_Wearing the outfit in which she was first lost, she looks anachronistic and wrong, bird-thin bones and dark hollows carved out of thin air, tattered blue jumper and staticky hair fluttering in a non-existent breeze. She looks terrifying and terrible, regal even in her disarray, pale beneath the blood that smears her limbs._

_"Beautiful, though," Donna adds, honest to a fault. "Must kill you, how beautiful she is."_

_The Doctor shoots her a look from behind the console, green light illuminating his glare._

_"Right," Donna amends. "Kill's not such a good choice of words, is it? Must hurt, then. Seeing her looking like that. So young but so...well, dead."_

_The Doctor doesn't speak, and Rose makes herself comfortable, leaning against one of the twisting support beams, features blurred, smile benevolent._

_"Why is she still here, Doctor?" Donna asks, and though her question is firm, her voice is soft. "What's got her sticking around in this stupid world?"_

_The TARDIS whirrs and screeches. Still, the Doctor doesn't speak._

_One by one, letters shimmer in the air. Rose sticks her tongue between gleaming white teeth as she shapes the B, the A, the D, the W, and the O, the L and the F._

_"Once upon an adventure," the Doctor says dully, eyes fixed on the console. "Rose Tyler was lost till she ripped the heart out of my ship and found the power to bend time itself. She framed the words and scattered the letters through all of existence. To remind herself. To lead herself back here. Back to me."_

_"And now she can't move on," Donna guesses, and shivers at the implaceable truth. "She won't move on. Doctor, she can't keep living in between, though. She'll go mad!"_

_When the Doctor finally looks up, his gaze is bright and wet and full to the brim with savage disbelief. "She said forever, didn't she? Decided who would live and die, worked her whims into the fabric of this universe. She wore timelines around her neck like a strand of pearls, Donna. And now they're choking her."_

_There is silence in the wake of the Doctor's condemnation, as they both turn to watch Rose dance where she stands, the pale lines of her lithe body like a white streak in the night sky._

_A comet, deadly and rare, returning home._

_Later on, they leave the city of Pompeii as fire rains down on the townspeople below, and Donna does not suggest they save a single soul._

|

Rose can feel reality pulling at her cells, one by one, ripping at the very structure of her being. Corporeality is beyond her as a general rule, but on some days, she cannot even bring the slivers of ectoplasm together to form a body. A shape. Instead, she roars through the '20s as a voice, a laugh, a rustle through the trees while a giant wasp goes around murdering innocent people.

A death for a life, to restore the balance of things. Rose Tyler walks the Earth in some manner or another, and so Agatha Christie vanishes. History begins to rewrite itself.

She shouldn't be here, she knows. 

(The universe knows, too.)

|

_"Oh, the places we will go," Rose mutters to the Doctor, when his door is shut and Donna is sleeping, and no one can see him lying on his bed, limbs tangled with the remains of the girl he once loved. Still loves, completely. Dangerously._

_"Barcelona," the Doctor recites feverishly. "The planet X'orchia l'anghla Tok. New York in the 1960's--brilliant colors."_

_Rose giggles, a slow revelation, and the weight of her body around his seems to pulse. "Yeah," she says. "I'd love that." Her fingers trail down the slope of his nose, the indent of his lips, wisps of grey curling tenderly against his face. He touches her hips, and for a moment, his hands seem to curve around flesh, thumbs pressing into the hot, dry, crumbling skin of someone long dead._

_He recoils, and Rose is ethereal again. Empty. An image, not a fact._

_"I want to take you everywhere I couldn't before," the Doctor whispers. "I want to show you everything, Rose."_

_Rose grins, and the yawning darkness seems to swallow him whole. "All that ever was, and could be?" She leans in, and her whisper slithers over him. "Let me."_

_Prophecy, taunt, promise. Her hands feel cold and vast like the farthest reaches of space. He leans into the freefall of her embrace, and closes his eyes._

_And Rose shows him the secrets that time has kept hidden._

_When the Doctor blinks awake, his head is ringing. A sense of madness lingers in the echoes of his heartbeats. Like drumbeats in the distance._

_Rose sleeps, and the Doctor thinks of what is to come._

|

A flick of her finger, and the gold spills like fire along a gasoline trail. It lights up the sky around her, makes everything blaze.

Rose can finally see through the darkness, and it's brilliant. Every path, every turn, and her footsteps do not falter. She walks every road and opens every door, because she can feel the Void calling her. The ash-black branches and the blood-red sky and the bone-white moon. The dead Daleks. The silent Cybermen. And every demon her mind could ever conjure.

Nothing, nothing could make her go back. And so she tears down the delicate fibers that keep this plane stitched together. A sabatogeur. For us, she thinks, when the Doctor looks at her like he knows. This is for us.

The bees go first, scientists all over the world puzzled by the disappearance. And then the Harold Saxon posters, flapping away in the wind. The candidate mysteriously vanishes one night, his clothes still in the closet and his widow Lucy crying hysterically of her husband "disintegrating right before her eyes."

With a sweep of her hand, Rose wiped out an entire Dalek fleet. She thumbed her nose at the Emperor, and revived a dead man for all time. The Master is nothing.

(And really, what exactly is he the Master of? Cheap parlor tricks and shameful hubris. If death is his game, then it is her masterpiece.) 

Rose will not say the word God, or Lord, but she will think it. Bad Wolf victorious, baying in tune with the singing, yearning, slow-cello melody of the TARDIS heart.

Somewhere in the depths of the ship, a bell rings. 

Outside, one by one, the stars begin to go out.

|

_"We'll all die, Doctor," Donna is screaming, face streaked with tears, red hair flying behind her. A warrior, clad in armor of wool and silk. "She's the only thing that can stop it. She's the bloody thing doing it, she's the only thing that can stop it!"_

_"She is not a thing," the Doctor replies, sternly, stubbornly, helplessly. Reality is falling apart at its seams. There are Daleks in the air, and alternate worlds peeking into their own. Long-dead loved ones mourning the fresh bodies of those newly-felled. Everything is in a flux. Everything is in utter, complete chaos._

_And in the middle, serene as can be, Rose. Standing with her finger crooked, hand on hip, eyes lit from within._

_"She can't stay here," Donna pleads. "She knows it. You know it. She's tearing apart everything to stay. And the universe is fighting as well. Nothing will survive when it's all over!"_

_Her hand grasps the Doctor's elbow, and he snaps. "What would you have me do?" he roars. "She won't leave! She won't let go! What am I supposed to do, Donna Noble, if you're so intelligent. What am I supposed to do?"_

_Her voice is soft, sad, matter-of-fact. "The hard thing," she responds, and hugs him to her as he crumbles. "You've got to let her go first."_

_Fifty paces ahead, Rose tilts her chin. An eerie wind seems to blow, and everything hovers on the edge of dissipating completely._

_The Doctor watches as Donna, the woman who became his best friend, who saved him when he could be saved, who stood by him as he fell, begins to disappear. Particle by particle. One by one. Unearthly screams reverberate from the throat that is rapidly vanishing, and the Doctor grasps at air._

_When his gaze finally meets Rose, it is different than it has ever been before. Anguish roils through him, unimaginable. But so does resolve, and Rose steps back._

_"The hard thing," the Doctor muses. Strides past the destruction, to the waiting TARDIS._

_And gets to work._

|

It is absolution, when the Doctor finally figures out how to kill Rose for good. It involves nothing more than machinery, ingenuity, and the final, fortunate push from the TARDIS itself.

Time wraps her in its arms, the unwinding of clocks, the wash of waves on the shore, the film-reel of every life ever lived in the entire story of things. And it whispers to Rose that she must go home.

Rose may love the Doctor, but she is a part of the ship. Twin souls. The ancient woman cries to the young child, and Rose bows her head. Lets her grip on the universe go.

In her final moments, she is solid again. The epitome of effervescent, ebullient youth. Her hair is gold and her eyes are brown and her lashes are darker than ink. When she smiles, her cheeks push up against her ears, and it is like happiness is finally something the Doctor can touch. 

She feels nineteen again, and the shadow of a flinty-eyed, shaved-head Doctor lurks in the corner behind this skinnier, sadder version.

Rose says that she is sorry. That she let the power get to her head. That she's learned her lesson, and that she hopes the Doctor will still let her travel with him. 

The Doctor holds her close and whispers that he loves her. That he will never forget her. And that he is sorry, too. That she will always, always be traveling with him.

And then he presses a button, and she closes her eyes.

For the first time since dying, Rose feels the light.

**Author's Note:**

> Reposted from LiveJournal.


End file.
